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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• Oracle Identity Manager Role Management With API

  - by mustafakaya

  As an administrator, you use roles to create and manage the records of a collection of users to whom you want to permit access to common functionality, such as access rights, roles, or permissions. Roles can be independent of an organization, span multiple organizations, or contain users from a single organization. Using roles, you can: View the menu items that the users can access through Oracle Identity Manager Administration Web interface. Assign users to roles. Assign a role to a parent role Designate status to the users so that they can specify defined responses for process tasks. Modify permissions on data objects. Designate role administrators to perform actions on roles, such as enabling members of another role to assign users to the current role, revoke members from current role and so on. Designate provisioning policies for a role. These policies determine if a resource object is to be provisioned to or requested for a member of the role. Assign or remove membership rules to or from the role. These rules determine which users can be assigned/removed as direct membership to/from the role.  In this post, i will share some examples for role management with Oracle Identity Management API.  You can do role operations you can use Thor.API.Operations.tcGroupOperationsIntf interface. tcGroupOperationsIntf service =  getClient().getService(tcGroupOperationsIntf.class);     Assign an user to role :    public void assignRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.addMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     }  Revoke an user from role:     public void revokeRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.removeMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     } Get all members of a role :      public List<User> getRoleMembers(String roleName) throws Exception {         List<User> userList = new ArrayList<User>();         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);       String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         tcResultSet members = service.getAllMemberUsers(Long.parseLong(groupKey));         for (int i = 0; i < members.getRowCount(); i++) {                 members.goToRow(i);                 long userKey = members.getLongValue("Users.Key");                 User member = oimUserManager.findUserByUserKey(String.valueOf(userKey));                 userList.add(member);         }        return userList;     } About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• The Future of Project Management is Social

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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• Skype support and dead parrot sketches

  - by Greg Low

  We as an industry have a lot to answer for. One thing is the level of support provided for users. Here's the conversation I'm having with Skype right now. It feels like being in a Monty Python skit. I was really hoping that when Microsoft purchased Skype that things might improve. 8:33:44 PM greglowInitial Question/Comment: Subscriptions (Unlimited Country, Unlimited Europe, Unlimited Region, Unlimited World)8:33:44 PM SystemThank you for contacting Skype Customer Support!8:33:49 PM SystemDonna Faye has joined this session!8:33:50 PM SystemConnected with Donna Faye8:33:50 PM SystemThank you for contacting Skype Customer Support!8:33:54 PM SystemPlease hold for the next available Live Support Agent.8:33:59 PM Donna FayeHello! Welcome to Skype Live Support! My name is Donna L. How may I help you?8:34:09 PM greglowI've got a subscription (skypename greglow)8:34:21 PM greglowIt's set to auto-renew8:34:45 PM greglowWhy have I been getting messages about my Skype number expiring, if it's set to renew automatically8:34:54 PM greglowand has recently renewed automatically8:35:09 PM Donna FayeThank you for the information.8:35:29 PM Donna FayeTo better assist you may I know your Skype name, please?8:35:37 PM greglowgreglow8:35:44 PM Donna FayeThank you.8:36:14 PM Donna FayeI understand your concern that you receive an email notification stating that your calling subscription will about to expire. Am I right?8:36:43 PM greglowNo, I got an email telling me that one of my Skype numbers was going to expire8:37:08 PM greglowWhen I went to the website, it said it was part of the subscription and the subscription was set to auto-renew8:37:18 PM greglowThe subscription auto-renewed on Oct XXth8:37:24 PM greglowBut the number still expired8:37:43 PM greglowWhen I logged on today, it said that the number had expired and that I had 52 days left to reactivate it8:37:58 PM greglowI did that but am trying to understand why that happens at all8:38:36 PM greglowWhy do you expire numbers that are part of auto-renewing subscriptions?8:39:49 PM Donna FayeUpon checking your account, your calling subscription link to three Online Numbers.8:39:55 PM greglowcorrect8:40:10 PM greglowbut until an hour or so ago, one of them had expired. why?8:40:54 PM Donna FayeLet me explain to you that now Online Number are detach to a calling subscription unlike before it was attach to the calling subscription so therefore each Online Number will recur individually.8:41:29 PM Donna FayeUpon checking your account it shows that all your Online Number will expire on October XX, 20138:41:44 PM Donna FayeIf you don't want to be charged again for you can cancel it anytime.8:41:59 PM greglowI have set it to charge automatically8:42:06 PM greglowso why do the numbers expire?8:42:32 PM Donna FayeNo they are not expired they are all active.8:42:33 PM greglowif there is an automatic payment set up, why does anything expire?8:42:52 PM greglowyes, but one of them was expired, and I only fixed it a few hours ago8:43:07 PM greglowI'm trying to understand why it expired8:44:54 PM Donna FayeThe email you got just notify you that you should have good enough funding source of your calling subscription and Online Number in order for this to recur.8:45:12 PM greglowAgreed. I did that but the number still expired. Why?8:45:38 PM Donna FayeHowever do not worry on this hence all Online Number are active and not expired.8:45:41 PM greglowWhen I logged on today it said that the number had expired and that I had 52 days left to reactivate it. Why did that happen?8:46:14 PM Donna FayeMay I know the Online Number you are pertaining, please?The number that had expired was (07) XXXX XXXX (Australia)8:49:19 PM Donna FayeOkay, do not worry on this Online Number because this will expire on October XX, 2013.8:49:38 PM Donna FayeThank you for all the information.8:49:46 PM greglowI understand that it won't expire now until next year. I'm trying to understand why it stopped working this time8:49:51 PM greglowso I can avoid that next time8:50:39 PM Donna FayeWhat do yo stop working, you mean that Online Number is unable to be reach out?8:50:59 PM Donna Faye*what do you mean by stop working8:51:18 PM greglowThe Skype number +61 7 XXXX XXXX stopped working because it expired8:51:32 PM Donna FayeNo, this into expired.8:51:34 PM greglowI'm trying to understand why it expired8:51:50 PM greglowSorry I don't follow "this into expired"8:52:39 PM Donna FayeLet me inform you that this Online Number is not expired.8:52:54 PM Donna FayePlease disregard the notification you see on your Skype account.8:53:02 PM greglowSorry, this is getting very frustrating. I already told you I fixed it today. I want to know why it happened.8:53:20 PM Donna FayeHence I can rest assured you that this is active until October XX, 2013.8:53:21 PM greglowSo I can avoid it happening again, on this account, or on our other accounts8:53:34 PM greglowCan I speak to someone who really understands this please?Donna FayeSkype send a notification to Skype users for their Skype product in order for them to be aware the expiration of your product however your Online Number still active on your account hence when your calling subscription Unlimited World recur your Online Number also recur. 8:57:59 PM Donna Faye I do apologize for this matter, please allow me to resolve this issue for you. 9:02:48 PM greglow My question is still the same: if it's set to auto-pay, why did it expire? 9:03:50 PM greglow Why did it stop working? Why did I have to "reactivate" it? 9:04:08 PM greglow Why didn't it just keep working if it's set to auto-pay? 9:04:30 PM greglow This isn't a difficult concept 9:04:34 PM Donna Faye Let me clarify to you that this is not the really expired what is emphasizing on this is when you don't have good enough funding source when you calling subscription recur the Online Number will possibly expired but seem that you have a good funding source then this will continue until 2013. 9:05:10 PM greglow When I logged on today, it was not working, and your website said it had expired and that I had 52 days left to reactivate it 9:05:17 PM greglow Why?and so on, and so on, and so on.... 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 02, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 02, 2014Popular ReleasesPortable Class Library for SQLite: Portable Class Library for SQLite - 3.8.4.4: This pull request from mattleibow addresses an issue with custom function creation (define functions in C# code and invoke them from SQLite as id they where regular SQL functions). Impact: Xamarin iOSTweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Tweetinvi 0.9.3.x: Timelines- Added all the parameters available from the Timeline Endpoints in Tweetinvi. - This is available for HomeTimeline, UserTimeline, MentionsTimeline // Simple query var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(); // Create a parameter for queries with specific parameters var timelineParameter = Timeline.GenerateHomeTimelineRequestParameter(); timelineParameter.ExcludeReplies = true; timelineParameter.TrimUser = true; var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(timelineParameter); Tweets- Add mis...Sandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Tooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Database Helper: Release 1.0.0.0: First Release of Database HelperCoMaSy: CoMaSy1.0.2: !Contact Management SystemImage View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Vi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Binary Top Verses: This one is the bin folder of the component. the .dll component is inside.Traditional Calendar Component: Traditional Calender Converter: Duta Wacana Christian University This file containing Traditional Calendar Component and Demo Aplication that using Traditional Calendar Component. This component made with .NET Framework 4 and the programming language is C# .SQLSetupHelper: 1.0.0.0: First Stable Version of SQL SetupComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesNew Projects[ISEN] Rendu de projet Naughty3Dogs - Pong3D: Pong3D est un jeu qui reprend le principe classique du Pong en le portant dans un environnement 3D à l'aide du langage c# et du moteur Unity3DBootstrap for MVC: Bootstrap for MVC.F. A. Q. - Najczesciej zadawane pytania: FAQForuMvc: Technifutur short projecthomework456: no.iStoody: Studies organize solution, available through app for Windows and Windows Phone.liaoliao: ???????????Price Tracker: Allows a user to track prices based on parsed emailsRoslynEval: RoslynRx Hub: Rx Hub provides server side computation which initiate by subscriber requestSharepoint Online AppCache Reset: We are an IT resource company providing Virtual IT services and custom and opensource programs for everyday needs. UnitConversionLib : Smart Unit Conversion Library in C#: Conversion of units, arithmetic operation and parsing quantities with their units on run time. Smart unit converter and conversion lib for physical quantities,

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• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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• I see no LOBs!

  - by Paul White

  Is it possible to see LOB (large object) logical reads from STATISTICS IO output on a table with no LOB columns? I was asked this question today by someone who had spent a good fraction of their afternoon trying to work out why this was occurring – even going so far as to re-run DBCC CHECKDB to see if any corruption had taken place.  The table in question wasn’t particularly pretty – it had grown somewhat organically over time, with new columns being added every so often as the need arose.  Nevertheless, it remained a simple structure with no LOB columns – no TEXT or IMAGE, no XML, no MAX types – nothing aside from ordinary INT, MONEY, VARCHAR, and DATETIME types.  To add to the air of mystery, not every query that ran against the table would report LOB logical reads – just sometimes – but when it did, the query often took much longer to execute. Ok, enough of the pre-amble.  I can’t reproduce the exact structure here, but the following script creates a table that will serve to demonstrate the effect: IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.Test', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE dbo.Test GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Test ( row_id NUMERIC IDENTITY NOT NULL,   col01 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col02 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col03 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col04 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col05 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col06 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col07 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col08 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col09 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, col10 NVARCHAR(450) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Test row_id] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (row_id) ) ; The next script loads the ten variable-length character columns with one-character strings in the first row, two-character strings in the second row, and so on down to the 450th row: WITH Numbers AS ( -- Generates numbers 1 - 450 inclusive SELECT TOP (450) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) INSERT dbo.Test WITH (TABLOCKX) SELECT REPLICATE(N'A', N.n), REPLICATE(N'B', N.n), REPLICATE(N'C', N.n), REPLICATE(N'D', N.n), REPLICATE(N'E', N.n), REPLICATE(N'F', N.n), REPLICATE(N'G', N.n), REPLICATE(N'H', N.n), REPLICATE(N'I', N.n), REPLICATE(N'J', N.n) FROM Numbers AS N ORDER BY N.n ASC ; Once those two scripts have run, the table contains 450 rows and 10 columns of data like this: Most of the time, when we query data from this table, we don’t see any LOB logical reads, for example: -- Find the maximum length of the data in -- column 5 for a range of rows SELECT result = MAX(DATALENGTH(T.col05)) FROM dbo.Test AS T WHERE row_id BETWEEN 50 AND 100 ; But with a different query… -- Read all the data in column 1 SELECT result = MAX(DATALENGTH(T.col01)) FROM dbo.Test AS T ; …suddenly we have 49 LOB logical reads, as well as the ‘normal’ logical reads we would expect. The Explanation If we had tried to create this table in SQL Server 2000, we would have received a warning message to say that future INSERT or UPDATE operations on the table might fail if the resulting row exceeded the in-row storage limit of 8060 bytes.  If we needed to store more data than would fit in an 8060 byte row (including internal overhead) we had to use a LOB column – TEXT, NTEXT, or IMAGE.  These special data types store the large data values in a separate structure, with just a small pointer left in the original row. Row Overflow SQL Server 2005 introduced a feature called row overflow, which allows one or more variable-length columns in a row to move to off-row storage if the data in a particular row would otherwise exceed 8060 bytes.  You no longer receive a warning when creating (or altering) a table that might need more than 8060 bytes of in-row storage; if SQL Server finds that it can no longer fit a variable-length column in a particular row, it will silently move one or more of these columns off the row into a separate allocation unit. Only variable-length columns can be moved in this way (for example the (N)VARCHAR, VARBINARY, and SQL_VARIANT types).  Fixed-length columns (like INTEGER and DATETIME for example) never move into ‘row overflow’ storage.  The decision to move a column off-row is done on a row-by-row basis – so data in a particular column might be stored in-row for some table records, and off-row for others. In general, if SQL Server finds that it needs to move a column into row-overflow storage, it moves the largest variable-length column record for that row.  Note that in the case of an UPDATE statement that results in the 8060 byte limit being exceeded, it might not be the column that grew that is moved! Sneaky LOBs Anyway, that’s all very interesting but I don’t want to get too carried away with the intricacies of row-overflow storage internals.  The point is that it is now possible to define a table with non-LOB columns that will silently exceed the old row-size limit and result in ordinary variable-length columns being moved to off-row storage.  Adding new columns to a table, expanding an existing column definition, or simply storing more data in a column than you used to – all these things can result in one or more variable-length columns being moved off the row. Note that row-overflow storage is logically quite different from old-style LOB and new-style MAX data type storage – individual variable-length columns are still limited to 8000 bytes each – you can just have more of them now.  Having said that, the physical mechanisms involved are very similar to full LOB storage – a column moved to row-overflow leaves a 24-byte pointer record in the row, and the ‘separate storage’ I have been talking about is structured very similarly to both old-style LOBs and new-style MAX types.  The disadvantages are also the same: when SQL Server needs a row-overflow column value it needs to follow the in-row pointer a navigate another chain of pages, just like retrieving a traditional LOB. And Finally… In the example script presented above, the rows with row_id values from 402 to 450 inclusive all exceed the total in-row storage limit of 8060 bytes.  A SELECT that references a column in one of those rows that has moved to off-row storage will incur one or more lob logical reads as the storage engine locates the data.  The results on your system might vary slightly depending on your settings, of course; but in my tests only column 1 in rows 402-450 moved off-row.  You might like to play around with the script – updating columns, changing data type lengths, and so on – to see the effect on lob logical reads and which columns get moved when.  You might even see row-overflow columns moving back in-row if they are updated to be smaller (hint: reduce the size of a column entry by at least 1000 bytes if you hope to see this). Be aware that SQL Server will not warn you when it moves ‘ordinary’ variable-length columns into overflow storage, and it can have dramatic effects on performance.  It makes more sense than ever to choose column data types sensibly.  If you make every column a VARCHAR(8000) or NVARCHAR(4000), and someone stores data that results in a row needing more than 8060 bytes, SQL Server might turn some of your column data into pseudo-LOBs – all without saying a word. Finally, some people make a distinction between ordinary LOBs (those that can hold up to 2GB of data) and the LOB-like structures created by row-overflow (where columns are still limited to 8000 bytes) by referring to row-overflow LOBs as SLOBs.  I find that quite appealing, but the ‘S’ stands for ‘small’, which makes expanding the whole acronym a little daft-sounding…small large objects anyone? © Paul White 2011 email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• Probation is Over: PASS Board Year 1, Q2

  - by Denise McInerney

  Though it's not always official every job begins with a probation period. You start out with lots of questions and every day you find out how much more you have to learn. Usually after a few months you discover that you can actually answer some questions and have at least an idea of what you are supposed to be doing. Now at the end of my second quarter on the "job" of serving on the PASS Board I have reached that point. My probation period is over. The last three months were busy for the entire Board with the budget process, an in-person meeting and moving forward with PASS Global Growth plans. I had also set a specific goal for myself for my 2nd quarter: to see the Board to adopt a Code of Conduct for the PASS Summit. Code of Conduct When I ran for the Board I included my desire to see PASS establish a code of conduct in my campaign platform.  I was motivated to do this for a few reasons. Other technical conferences have had incidents of harassment. Most of these did not have a policy in place prior to having a problem, though several conference organizers have since adopted anti-harassment policies or codes of conduct. I felt it would be in PASS' interest to establish a policy so we would be prepared should there be an incident.   "This is Community" Adopting a code of conduct would reinforce our community orientation and send a message about the positive character of the Summit. PASS is a leader among technical organizations for its promotion and support of women. Adopting a code of conduct would further demonstrate our leadership in this area. After researching similar polices from other organizations I published a first draft in April. I solicited feedback from the Board, HQ staff and some PASS members. Incorporating that feedback I presented version 4 at the May Board meeting, where we had a good discussion. You can read the meeting minutes for details. I incorporated points from  the Board discussion as well as feedback from a legal review to produce a final version which has been submitted to the Board. It will be discussed at the Board meeting July 12. You can read the full text at the end of this post. Virtual Chapters In the first quarter we started ramping up marketing support for the Virtual Chapters. Since then each edition of the Connector has highlighted a different VC to help get out the message about the variety of eductional opporutnities that are offered. These VC profiles will continue in the coming months. I was very pleased to welcome the new DBA Fundamentals VC which is geared toward new DBAs, people who are considering entering the field and those transitioning from a different IT role. Thanks to the contributions of Erin Stellato, Michelle Nalliah and Karla Landrum we published a "Virtual Chapter Guidebook". This document includes great advice on how to build and promote a VC. It's also a reference for how things work, from budgets to webinar hosting. I think this document will be extremely valuable to all our VC leaders and am grateful to those who put it together. Board Meeting/SQL Rally The Board met in May in Dallas. Among the items discussed were Global Growth, the budget, future events and the upcoming elections. We covered a lot of ground in two days and I will again refer you to the meeting minutes for details. The meeting schedule allowed us to participate in the SQL Rally networking events and one full day of the conference. I enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and talk with many PASS members. And my hat is off to the SQL Rally organizers who put on an outstanding event. Global Growth PASS has undertaken a major intitiative to reach and engage SQL Server professionals around the world. This Global Growth plan is ambitious and will have a significant impact on the strategic direction of the organization. We have been reaching out to the community for feedback, including hosting Twitter chats and live Town Hall meetings. I co-hosted two of these events and appreciated hearing the different perspectives of the people who participated If you have not done so I encourage you to read about the Global Growth vision and proposed governance changes  and submit your feedback. FY13 Budget July 1 is the beginning of PASS' fiscal year, which makes the end of June the deadline for approving a budget. Each director submits a budget for his or her portfolio. For the Virtual Chapter portfolio I focused on how we can allocate resources to grow the VCs. Budgeting is a give-and-take process, and while I didn't get everything I asked for I'm pleased the FY13 budget includes a significant increase in financial support for the Virtual Chapters. Many people put a lot of work into the budget, but no two people deserve credit more than VP of Finance Douglas McDowell and Accounting Manager Sandy Cherry. Thanks to both of them for getting us across the goal line on time. SQL Saturday I attended SQL Saturdays in Orange Co. CA and Phoenix. It's always inspiring to see the enthusiasm in the community for learning and networking. These events are successful due to the hard work of many volunteers. Thanks to the organizers in both cities for all your efforts. Next Up This quarter we'll be gearing up plans for the VCs at the Summit and exploring ways the VCs can best support PASS' Global Growth work. I'll also be wrapping up work on the Code of Conduct and attending a Board meeting in September. And I will be at SQL Saturday #144 in Sacramento later this month. Here is the language of the Code of Conduct I have submitted to the Board for consideration: PASS Code of Conduct The PASS Summit provides database professionals from a variety of backgrounds with an opportunity to connect, share and learn.  We value the strong sense of community that characterizes this event and we seek to foster an inclusive, professional atmosphere. We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, religion or any other protected classification.  Everyone at the Summit is expected to follow the Code of Conduct. This includes but is not limited to: PASS Staff, Exhibitors, Speakers, Attendees and anyone affiliated with the event. Participants are expected to follow the Code of Conduct at all Summit events, including PASS-sponsored social events. Participant behavior Harassment includes, but is not limited to, offensive verbal comments related to gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, religion, or any other protected classification.  Intimidation, threats, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact and unwelcome attention will also be considered harassment. Similarly, sexual, racist, derogatory, threatening or other inappropriate language and imagery are not appropriate for any conference venue, including sessions.  Recourse If a participant engages in any conduct that is prohibited under this Code of Conduct, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expelling the offender from the conference. No refunds will be granted to attendees expelled from the Summit due to violations of the Code of Conduct. If you are being harassed, witness harassment, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified by their “Headquarters/Staff” shirts and are trained to handle the situation appropriately. A Code of Conduct Committee (CCC) made up of the Executive Manager and three members of the Board of Directors designated by the President will be authorized to take action in response to an incident or behavior that violates the Code of Conduct.

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• When is a Seek not a Seek?

  - by Paul White

  The following script creates a single-column clustered table containing the integers from 1 to 1,000 inclusive. IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#Test', N'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Test ; GO CREATE TABLE #Test ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ); ; INSERT #Test (id) SELECT V.number FROM master.dbo.spt_values AS V WHERE V.[type] = N'P' AND V.number BETWEEN 1 AND 1000 ; Let’s say we need to find the rows with values from 100 to 170, excluding any values that divide exactly by 10.  One way to write that query would be: SELECT T.id FROM #Test AS T WHERE T.id IN ( 101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109, 111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119, 121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129, 131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139, 141,142,143,144,145,146,147,148,149, 151,152,153,154,155,156,157,158,159, 161,162,163,164,165,166,167,168,169 ) ; That query produces a pretty efficient-looking query plan: Knowing that the source column is defined as an INTEGER, we could also express the query this way: SELECT T.id FROM #Test AS T WHERE T.id >= 101 AND T.id <= 169 AND T.id % 10 > 0 ; We get a similar-looking plan: If you look closely, you might notice that the line connecting the two icons is a little thinner than before.  The first query is estimated to produce 61.9167 rows – very close to the 63 rows we know the query will return.  The second query presents a tougher challenge for SQL Server because it doesn’t know how to predict the selectivity of the modulo expression (T.id % 10 > 0).  Without that last line, the second query is estimated to produce 68.1667 rows – a slight overestimate.  Adding the opaque modulo expression results in SQL Server guessing at the selectivity.  As you may know, the selectivity guess for a greater-than operation is 30%, so the final estimate is 30% of 68.1667, which comes to 20.45 rows. The second difference is that the Clustered Index Seek is costed at 99% of the estimated total for the statement.  For some reason, the final SELECT operator is assigned a small cost of 0.0000484 units; I have absolutely no idea why this is so, or what it models.  Nevertheless, we can compare the total cost for both queries: the first one comes in at 0.0033501 units, and the second at 0.0034054.  The important point is that the second query is costed very slightly higher than the first, even though it is expected to produce many fewer rows (20.45 versus 61.9167). If you run the two queries, they produce exactly the same results, and both complete so quickly that it is impossible to measure CPU usage for a single execution.  We can, however, compare the I/O statistics for a single run by running the queries with STATISTICS IO ON: Table '#Test'. Scan count 63, logical reads 126, physical reads 0. Table '#Test'. Scan count 01, logical reads 002, physical reads 0. The query with the IN list uses 126 logical reads (and has a ‘scan count’ of 63), while the second query form completes with just 2 logical reads (and a ‘scan count’ of 1).  It is no coincidence that 126 = 63 * 2, by the way.  It is almost as if the first query is doing 63 seeks, compared to one for the second query. In fact, that is exactly what it is doing.  There is no indication of this in the graphical plan, or the tool-tip that appears when you hover your mouse over the Clustered Index Seek icon.  To see the 63 seek operations, you have click on the Seek icon and look in the Properties window (press F4, or right-click and choose from the menu): The Seek Predicates list shows a total of 63 seek operations – one for each of the values from the IN list contained in the first query.  I have expanded the first seek node to show the details; it is seeking down the clustered index to find the entry with the value 101.  Each of the other 62 nodes expands similarly, and the same information is contained (even more verbosely) in the XML form of the plan. Each of the 63 seek operations starts at the root of the clustered index B-tree and navigates down to the leaf page that contains the sought key value.  Our table is just large enough to need a separate root page, so each seek incurs 2 logical reads (one for the root, and one for the leaf).  We can see the index depth using the INDEXPROPERTY function, or by using the a DMV: SELECT S.index_type_desc, S.index_depth FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats ( DB_ID(N'tempdb'), OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb..#Test', N'U'), 1, 1, DEFAULT ) AS S ; Let’s look now at the Properties window when the Clustered Index Seek from the second query is selected: There is just one seek operation, which starts at the root of the index and navigates the B-tree looking for the first key that matches the Start range condition (id >= 101).  It then continues to read records at the leaf level of the index (following links between leaf-level pages if necessary) until it finds a row that does not meet the End range condition (id <= 169).  Every row that meets the seek range condition is also tested against the Residual Predicate highlighted above (id % 10 > 0), and is only returned if it matches that as well. You will not be surprised that the single seek (with a range scan and residual predicate) is much more efficient than 63 singleton seeks.  It is not 63 times more efficient (as the logical reads comparison would suggest), but it is around three times faster.  Let’s run both query forms 10,000 times and measure the elapsed time: DECLARE @i INTEGER, @n INTEGER = 10000, @s DATETIME = GETDATE() ; SET NOCOUNT ON; SET STATISTICS XML OFF; ; WHILE @n > 0 BEGIN SELECT @i = T.id FROM #Test AS T WHERE T.id IN ( 101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109, 111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119, 121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129, 131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139, 141,142,143,144,145,146,147,148,149, 151,152,153,154,155,156,157,158,159, 161,162,163,164,165,166,167,168,169 ) ; SET @n -= 1; END ; PRINT DATEDIFF(MILLISECOND, @s, GETDATE()) ; GO DECLARE @i INTEGER, @n INTEGER = 10000, @s DATETIME = GETDATE() ; SET NOCOUNT ON ; WHILE @n > 0 BEGIN SELECT @i = T.id FROM #Test AS T WHERE T.id >= 101 AND T.id <= 169 AND T.id % 10 > 0 ; SET @n -= 1; END ; PRINT DATEDIFF(MILLISECOND, @s, GETDATE()) ; On my laptop, running SQL Server 2008 build 4272 (SP2 CU2), the IN form of the query takes around 830ms and the range query about 300ms.  The main point of this post is not performance, however – it is meant as an introduction to the next few parts in this mini-series that will continue to explore scans and seeks in detail. When is a seek not a seek?  When it is 63 seeks © Paul White 2011 email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_kiwi

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center : Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other Content

  - by LeonShaner

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides numerous ways to deploy content, such as through OS Update Profiles, or as part of an OS Provisioning plan or combinations of those and other "Install Software" capabilities of Deployment Plans.  This short "how-to" blog will highlight an alternative way to deploy content using Operational Profiles. Usually we think of Operational Profiles as a way to execute a simple "one-time" script to perform a basic system administration function, which can optionally be based on user input; however, Operational Profiles can be much more powerful than that.  There is often more to performing an action than merely running a script -- sometimes configuration files, packages, binaries, and other scripts, etc. are needed to perform the action, and sometimes the user would like to leave such content on the system for later use. For shell scripts and other content written to be generic enough to work on any flavor of UNIX, converting the same scripts and configuration files into Solaris 10 SVR4 package, Solaris 11 IPS package, and/or a Linux RPM's might be seen as three times the work, for little appreciable gain.   That is where using an Operational Profile to deploy simple scripts and other generic content can be very helpful.  The approach is so powerful, that pretty much any kind of content can be deployed using an Operational Profile, provided the files involved are not overly large, and it is not necessary to convert the content into UNIX variant-specific formats. The basic formula for deploying content with an Operational Profile is as follows: Begin with a traditional script header, which is a UNIX shell script that will be responsible for decoding and extracting content, copying files into the right places, and executing any other scripts and commands needed to install and configure that content. Include steps to make the script platform-aware, to do the right thing for a given UNIX variant, or a "sorry" message if the operator has somehow tried to run the Operational Profile on a system where the script is not designed to run.  Ops Center can constrain execution by target type, so such checks at this level are an added safeguard, but also useful with the generic target type of "Operating System" where the admin wants the script to "do the right thing," whatever the UNIX variant. Include helpful output to show script progress, and any other informational messages that can help the admin determine what has gone wrong in the case of a problem in script execution.  Such messages will be shown in the job execution log. Include necessary "clean up" steps for normal and error exit conditions Set non-zero exit codes when appropriate -- a non-zero exit code will cause an Operational Profile job to be marked failed, which is the admin's cue to look into the job details for diagnostic messages in the output from the script. That first bullet deserves some explanation.  If Operational Profiles are usually simple "one-time" scripts and binary content is not allowed, then how does the actual content, packages, binaries, and other scripts get delivered along with the script?  More specifically, how does one include such content without needing to first create some kind of traditional package?   All that is required is to simply encode the content and append it to the end of the Operational Profile.  The header portion of the Operational Profile will need to contain the commands to decode the embedded content that has been appended to the bottom of the script.  The header code can do whatever else is needed, and finally clean up any intermediate files that were created during the decoding and extraction of the content. One way to encode binary and other content for inclusion in a script is to use the "uuencode" utility to convert the content into simple base64 ASCII text -- a form that is suitable to be appended to an Operational Profile.   The behavior of the "uudecode" utility is such that it will skip over any parts of the input that do not fit the uuencoded "begin" and "end" clauses.  For that reason, your header script will be skipped over, and uudecode will find your embedded content, that you will uuencode and paste at the end of the Operational Profile.  You can have as many "begin" / "end" clauses as you need -- just separate each embedded file by an empty line between "begin" and "end" clauses. Example:  Install SUNWsneep and set the system serial number Script:  deploySUNWsneep.sh ( <- right-click / save to download) Highlights: #!/bin/sh # Required variables: OC_SERIAL="$OC_SERIAL" # The user-supplied serial number for the asset ... Above is a good practice, showing right up front what kind of input the Operational Profile will require.   The right-hand side where $OC_SERIAL appears in this example will be filled in by Ops Center based on the user input at deployment time. The script goes on to restrict the use of the program to the intended OS type (Solaris 10 or older, in this example, but other content might be suitable for Solaris 11, or Linux -- it depends on the content and the script that will handle it). A temporary working directory is created, and then we have the command that decodes the embedded content from "self" which in scripting terms is $0 (a variable that expands to the name of the currently executing script): # Pass myself through uudecode, which will extract content to the current dir uudecode $0 At that point, whatever content was appended in uuencoded form at the end of the script has been written out to the current directory.  In this example that yields a file, SUNWsneep.7.0.zip, which the rest of the script proceeds to unzip, and pkgadd, followed by running "/opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep -s $OC_SERIAL" which is the command that stores the system serial for future use by other programs such as Explorer.   Don't get hung up on the example having used a pkgadd command.  The content started as a zip file and it could have been a tar.gz, or any other file.  This approach simply decodes the file.  The header portion of the script has to make sense of the file and do the right thing (e.g. it's up to you). The script goes on to clean up after itself, whether or not the above was successful.  Errors are echo'd by the script and a non-zero exit code is set where appropriate. Second to last, we have: # just in case, exit explicitly, so that uuencoded content will not cause error OPCleanUP exit # The rest of the script is ignored, except by uudecode # # UUencoded content follows # # e.g. for each file needed, #  $ uuencode -m {source} {source} > {target}.uu5 # then paste the {target}.uu5 files below # they will be extracted into the workding dir at $TDIR # The commentary above also describes how to encode the content. Finally we have the uuencoded content: begin-base64 444 SUNWsneep.7.0.zip UEsDBBQAAAAIAPsRy0Di3vnukAAAAMcAAAAKABUAcmVhZG1lLnR4dFVUCQADOqnVT7up ... VXgAAFBLBQYAAAAAAgACAJEAAADTNwEAAAA= ==== That last line of "====" is the base64 uuencode equivalent of a blank line, followed by "end" and as mentioned you can have as many begin/end clauses as you need.  Just separate each embedded file by a blank line after each ==== and before each begin-base64. Deploying the example Operational Profile looks like this (where I have pasted the system serial number into the required field): The job succeeded, but here is an example of the kind of diagnostic messages that the example script produces, and how Ops Center displays them in the job details: This same general approach could be used to deploy Explorer, and other useful utilities and scripts. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• career advice for PhD scientist seeking to program?

  - by C SD

  I'm largely a self-taught programmer. In fact, I first started programming about half way through biophysics grad school, and even though I think I've done some pretty nice work, I've never worked as part of a 'serious' development team that had more than one or two other developers (and I wouldn't hesitate to call them equally inexperienced in software development as a profession). After finishing my PhD I applied to Google, on a lark, since I had some confidence in my abilities, if not necessarily my experience, and I was hoping to maybe slip in and absorb all the experience and talent I'd be surrounded with and become productive enough, quickly enough, that they wouldn't immediately regret their decision. I was excited to actually get invited to interview up at Mountain View (this was ~ mid 2008). Overall, my memory of the interview was very positive, but after close to a three month wait (is that normal?) they ended up turning me down. I wasn't too surprised or disappointed (aside from the uncomfortably long wait) given my unusual background and admitted lack of experience. I decided to continue as a postdoc, but focus on improving my skills rather than doing research. I've done about three years of that, and my honest assessment is that I've learned a ton more, but I really need more of a peer group to maintain or accelerate my growth. Google invited me to interview again about eight months ago, and the interview process went even better than the first time around (I thought), though they again declined to give me an offer. I have to admit this second rejection was much more discouraging. They had insisted I interview even after I mentioned to them that a move on my part was unlikely given that I had bought a house, gotten married, etc. since the first interview. I guess I was hoping they'd at least give me an offer that I could parlay into a more conventional, but still interesting, programming position close to home. So here I am, going on my third year out of grad school, a glorified postdoc and I'm starting to get pretty discouraged. Even though I could technically get 'back-on-track' for a career in science, I have been focusing the vast majority of this time on gaining programming experience rather than on research and publications. The problem is, whenever I look, most job listings have requirements that seem impossibly grandiose and I hesitate to apply. That, or the job/project seems incredibly dull. Ironically, applying to Google struck me as less intimidating. I suspect that either most people are just a lot less realistic than I am when it comes to assessing how long it will take for them to get up to speed, or they don't care; my fear is that I'm just woefully unqualified for any interesting, well paying work. IE: I'm confident I could switch fully back into C++ mode with a couple weeks work (I mostly use C,Python,C# daily) but I don't list myself as being 'proficient' in C++ on my CV, or applying for jobs that 'require' such knowledge. The few applications for which I did feel I was a legitimately good match have not elicited a response. I suspect the following things are potential problems with my application/CV and I would like feedback on: I don't have a CS degree. My BS was in biochemistry and molecular biology, my PhD in biophysics. I took a undergrad and grad level CS course at UCSD and completely killed them, but I don't know how to translate that to my CV effectively. I have a PhD, but it's not in CS... I've been debating if I should remove it from my CV, and wether or not it would then be misleading to list at least some of those years as some kind of 'programming' job (in many respects it was). I think there are sometimes strong stigmas associated with 'self-taught' programmers. I am certainly one of those. I even recognize that some of those stigmas hold a hint of truth, but I really do want to be an asset to a team. How do I communicate that even though I have been largely self-directing for ~8 years I can still take marching orders when needed? Do I just say so outright? Should I just become a lot less scrupulous about the whole process? anecdote: I have a friend who applied for positions where he completely fudged his qualifications to get past the first culling. He was much more honest and forthcoming about his actual qualifications when contacted and he still managed to get invited to a couple of interviews and even got some offers. His balls are larger than mine though.

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• Fun with Aggregates

  - by Paul White

  There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• MapRedux - PowerShell and Big Data

  - by Dittenhafer Solutions

  MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, I am more inclinded to be successful with experimentation when on the Windows platform. Of course, it is not that I am "religious" about one set of technologies other another, but rather more experienced. Anyway, within the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about PowerShell a bit more as the 2012 PowerShell Scripting Games approach and it occured to me that PowerShell's support for Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and some other inherent features of PowerShell might lend themselves particularly well to a simple implementation of the MapReduce framework. I fired up my PowerShell ISE and started writing just to see where it would take me. Quite simply, the ScriptBlock feature combined with the ability of Invoke-Command to create remote jobs on networked servers provides much of the plumbing of a distributed computing environment. There are some limiting factors of course. Microsoft provided some default settings which prevent PowerShell from taking over a network without administrative approval first. But even with just one adjustment, a given Windows-based machine can become a node in a MapReduce-style distributed computing environment. Ok, so enough introduction. Let's talk about the code. First, any machine that will participate as a remote "node" will need WinRM enabled for remote access, as shown below. This is not exactly practical for hundreds of intended nodes, but for one (or five) machines in a test environment it does just fine. C:> winrm quickconfig WinRM is not set up to receive requests on this machine. The following changes must be made: Set the WinRM service type to auto start. Start the WinRM service. Make these changes [y/n]? y Alternatively, you could take the approach described in the Remotely enable PSRemoting post from the TechNet forum and use PowerShell to create remote scheduled tasks that will call Enable-PSRemoting on each intended node. Invoke-MapRedux Moving on, now that you have one or more remote "nodes" enabled, you can consider the actual Map and Reduce algorithms. Consider the following snippet: $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose Invoke-MapRedux takes an instance of a MapReduceItem which references the Map and Reduce scriptblocks, an array of computer names which are the remote nodes, and the initial data set to be processed. As simple as that, you can start working with concepts of big data and the MapReduce paradigm. Now, how did we get there? I have published the initial version of my PsMapRedux PowerShell Module on GitHub. The PsMapRedux module provides the Invoke-MapRedux function described above. Feel free to browse the underlying code and even contribute to the project! In a later post, I plan to show some of the inner workings of the module, but for now let's move on to how the Map and Reduce functions are defined. Map Both the Map and Reduce functions need to follow a prescribed prototype. The prototype for a Map function in the MapRedux module is as follows. A simple scriptblock that takes one PsObject parameter and returns a hashtable. It is important to note that the PsObject $dataset parameter is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property which offers an array of data to be processed by the Map function. $aMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) # Indicate the job is running on the remote node. Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); # The hashtable to return $list = @{}; # ... Perform the mapping work and prepare the $list hashtable result with your custom PSObject... # ... The $dataset has a single 'Data' property which contains an array of data rows # which is a subset of the originally submitted data set. # Return the hashtable (Key, PSObject) Write-Output $list; } Reduce Likewise, with the Reduce function a simple prototype must be followed which takes a $key and a result $dataset from the MapRedux's partitioning function (which joins the Map results by key). Again, the $dataset is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property as described in the Map section. $aReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) # The hashtable to return $redux = @{}; # Return Write-Output $redux; } All Together Now When everything is put together in a short example script, you implement your Map and Reduce functions, query for some starting data, build the MapReduxItem via New-MapReduxItem and call Invoke-MapRedux to get the process started: # Import the MapRedux and SQL Server providers Import-Module "MapRedux" Import-Module “sqlps” -DisableNameChecking # Query the database for a dataset Set-Location SQLSERVER:\sql\dbserver1\default\databases\myDb $query = "SELECT MyKey, Date, Value1 FROM BigData ORDER BY MyKey"; Write-Host "Query: $query" $dataset = Invoke-SqlCmd -query $query # Build the Map function $MyMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); $list = @{}; foreach($row in $dataset.Data) { # Write-Host ("Key: " + $row.MyKey.ToString()); if($list.ContainsKey($row.MyKey) -eq $true) { $s = $list.Item($row.MyKey); $s.Sum += $row.Value1; $s.Count++; } else { $s = New-Object PSObject; $s | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MyKey -Value $row.MyKey; $s | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -Name Sum -Value $row.Value1; $list.Add($row.MyKey, $s); } } Write-Output $list; } $MyReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) $redux = @{}; $count = 0; foreach($s in $dataset.Data) { $sum += $s.Sum; $count += 1; } # Reduce $redux.Add($s.MyKey, $sum / $count); # Return Write-Output $redux; } # Create the item data $Mr = New-MapReduxItem "My Test MapReduce Job" $MyMap $MyReduce # Array of processing nodes... $MyNodes = ("node1", "node2", "node3", "node4", "localhost") # Run the Map Reduce routine... $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose # Show the results Set-Location C:\ $MyMrResults | Out-GridView Conclusion I hope you have seen through this article that PowerShell has a significant infrastructure available for distributed computing. While it does take some code to expose a MapReduce-style framework, much of the work is already done and PowerShell could prove to be the the easiest platform to develop and run big data jobs in your corporate data center, potentially in the Azure cloud, or certainly as an academic excerise at home or school. Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on the continuing progress of my Powershell MapRedux module, and thanks for reading! Daniel

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• The True Cost of a Solution

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I had a Twitter chat recently with someone suggesting Oracle and SQL Server were losing out to OSS (Open Source Software) in the enterprise due to their issues with scaling or being too generic (one size fits all). I challenged that a bit, as my experience with enterprise sized clients has been different – adverse to OSS but receptive to an established vendor. The response I got was: Found it easier to influence change by showing how X can’t solve our problems or X is extremely costly to scale. Money talks. I think this is definitely the right approach for anyone pitching an alternate or alien technology as part of a solution: identify the issue, identify the solution, then present pros and cons including a cost/benefit analysis. What can happen though is we get tunnel vision and don’t present a full view of the costs associated with a solution. An “Acura”te Example (I’m so clever…) This is my dream vehicle, a Crystal Black Pearl coloured Acura MDX with the SH-AWD package! We’re a family of 4 (5 if my daughters ever get their wish of adding a dog), and I’ve always wanted a luxury type of vehicle, so this is a perfect replacement in a few years when our Rav 4 has hit the 8 – 10 year mark. MSRP – $62,890 But as we all know, that’s not *really* the cost of the vehicle. There’s taxes and fees added on, there’s the extended warranty if I choose to purchase it, there’s the finance rate that needs to be factored in… MSRP –   $62,890 Taxes –      $7,546 Warranty - $2,500 SubTotal – $72,936 Finance Charge – $ 1094.04 Grand Total – $74,030 Well! Glad we did that exercise – we discovered an extra $11k added on to the MSRP! Well now we have our true price…or do we? Lifetime of the Vehicle I’m expecting to have this vehicle for 7 – 10 years. While the hard cost of the vehicle is known and dealt with, the costs to run and maintain the vehicle are on top of this. I did some research, and here’s what I’ve found: Fuel and Mileage Gas prices are high as it is for regular fuel, but getting into an MDX will require that I *only* purchase premium fuel, which comes at a premium price. I need to expect my bill at the pump to be higher. Comparing the MDX to my 2007 Rav4 also shows I’ll be gassing up more often. The Rav4 has a city MPG of 21, while the MDX plummets to 16! The MDX does have a bigger fuel tank though, so all in all the number of times I hit the pumps might even out. Still, I estimate I’ll be spending approximately $8000 – $10000 more on gas over a 10 year period than my current Rav4. Service Options Limited Although I have options with my Toyota here in Winnipeg (we have 4 Toyota dealerships), I do go to my original dealer for any service work. Still, I like the fact that I have options. However, there’s only one Acura dealership in all of Winnipeg! So if, for whatever reason, I’m not satisfied with the level of service I’m stuck. Non Warranty Service Work Also let’s not forget that there’s a bulk of work required every year that is *not* covered under warranty – oil changes, tire rotations, brake pads, etc. I expect I’ll need to get new tires at the 5 years mark as well, which can easily be $1200 – $1500 (I just paid $1000 for new tires for the Rav4 and we’re at the 5 year mark). Now these aren’t going to be *new* costs that I’m not used to from our existing vehicles, but they should still be factored in. I’d budget $500/year, or $5000 over the 10 years I’ll own the vehicle. Final Assessment So let’s re-assess the true cost of my dream MDX: MSRP                    $62,890 Taxes                       $7,546 Warranty                 $2,500 Finance Charge         $1094 Gas                        $10,000 Service Work            $5000 Grand Total           $89,030 So now I have a better idea of 10 year cost overall, and I’ve identified some concerns with local service availability. And there’s now much more to consider over the original $62,890 price tag. Tying This Back to Technology Solutions The process that we just went through is no different than what organizations do when considering implementing a new system, technology, or technology based solution, within their environments. It’s easy to tout the short term cost savings of particular product/platform/technology in a vacuum. But its when you consider the wider impact that the true cost comes into play. Let’s create a scenario: A company is not happy with its current data reporting suite. An employee suggests moving to an open source solution. The selling points are: - Because its open source its free - The organization would have access to the source code so they could alter it however they wished - It provided features not available with the current reporting suite At first this sounds great to the management and executive, but then they start asking some questions and uncover more information: - The OSS product is built on a technology not used anywhere within the organization - There are no vendors offering product support for the OSS product - The OSS product requires a specific server platform to operate on, one that’s not standard in the organization All of a sudden, the true cost of implementing this solution is starting to become clearer. The company might save money on licensing costs, but their training costs would increase significantly – developers would need to learn how to develop in the technology the OSS solution was built on, IT staff must learn how to set up and maintain a new server platform within their existing infrastructure, and if a problem was found there was no vendor to contact for support. The true cost of implementing a “free” OSS solution is actually spinning up a project to implement it within the organization – no small cost. And that’s just the short-term cost. Now the organization must ensure they maintain trained staff who can make changes to the OSS reporting solution and IT staff that will stay knowledgeable in the new server platform. If those skills are very niche, then higher labour costs could be incurred if those people are hard to find or if trained employees use that knowledge as leverage for higher pay. Maybe a vendor exists that will contract out support, but then there are those costs to consider as well. And let’s not forget end-user training – in our example, anyone that runs reports will need to be trained on how to use the new system. Here’s the Point We still tend to look at software in an “off the shelf” kind of way. It’s very easy to say “oh, this product is better than vendor x’s product – and its free because its OSS!” but the reality is that implementing any new technology within an organization has a cost regardless of the retail price of the product. Training, integration, support – these are real costs that impact an organization and span multiple departments. Whether you’re pitching an improved business process, a new system, or a new technology, you need to consider the bigger picture costs of implementation. What you define as success (in our example, having better reporting functionality) might not be what others define as success if implementing your solution causes them issues. A true enterprise solution needs to consider the entire enterprise.

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• Refactoring an ERB Template to Haml

  - by Liam McLennan

  ERB is the default view templating system used by Ruby on Rails. Haml is an alternative templating system that uses whitespace to represent document structure. The example from the haml website shows the following equivalent markup: Haml ERB #profile .left.column #date= print_date #address= current_user.address .right.column #email= current_user.email #bio= current_user.bio <div id="profile"> <div class="left column"> <div id="date"><%= print_date %></div> <div id="address"><%= current_user.address %></div> </div> <div class="right column"> <div id="email"><%= current_user.email %></div> <div id="bio"><%= current_user.bio %></div> </div> </div> I like haml because it is concise and the significant whitespace makes it easy to see the structure at a glance. This post is about a ruby project but nhaml makes haml available for asp.net MVC also. The ERB Template Today I spent some time refactoring an ERB template to Haml. The template is called list.html.erb and its purpose is to render a list of tweets (twitter messages). <style> form { float: left; } </style> <h1>Tweets</h1> <table> <thead><tr><th></th><th>System</th><th>Human</th><th></th></tr></thead> <% @tweets.each do |tweet| %> <tr> <td><%= h(tweet['text']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['system_classification']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['human_classification']) %></td> <td><form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> </form> </td> </tr> <% end %> </table> Haml Template: Take 1 My first step was to convert this page to a Haml template in place. Directly translating the ERB template to Haml resulted in: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table %thead %tr %th %th System %th Human %th %tbody - @tweets.each do |tweet| %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} end I like this better already but I can go further. Haml Template: Take 2 The haml documentation says to avoid using iterators so I introduced a partial template (_tweet.haml) as the template to render a single tweet. _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} and the list template is simplified to: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table     %thead         %tr             %th             %th System             %th Human             %th     %tbody         = render(:partial => "tweet", :collection => @tweets) That is definitely an improvement, but then I noticed that _tweet.haml contains three form tags that are nearly identical.   Haml Template: Take 3 My first attempt, later aborted, was to use a helper to remove the duplication. A much better solution is to use another partial.  _rate_button.haml %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag %input{ :type => "submit", :value => rate_button[:rating].capitalize } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:rating], :name => 'rating' } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:id], :name => 'id' } and the tweet template is now simpler: _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'positive', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'neutral', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'negative', :id=> tweet['id']}) list.haml remains unchanged. Summary I am extremely happy with the switch. No doubt there are further improvements that I can make, but I feel like what I have now is clean and well factored.

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• How To: Using SimpleMembserhipProvider with MySql Connector/Net.

  - by Francisco Tirado

  Now on Connector/Net 6.9 the users will have the ability to use SimpleMembership Provider on MVC4 templates. The configuration is very simple and also have compatibility with OAuth, in this post we'll explain step by step how to configure it in a MVC 4 Web Application. Requirements  The requirements to use SimpleMembership with Connector/Net are: Install Connector/Net 6.9, or download the No Install version. Net Framework 4.0 or greater. MVC 4  Visual Studio 2012 or newer version Creating and configuring a new project In this example we'll use VS2012 to create the project basis on the Internet Aplication template and using Entity Framework to manage the User model. Open VS 2012 and create a new project, we'll create a new MVC 4 Web Application and configure the project to use Net Framework 4.5. Type a name for the project and then click “Ok”. In the next dialog we'll choose the “Internet Application” template and use Razor as engine without creating a test project. Click “Ok” to continue. Now we have a new project with the templates necessaries to run a Web Application with the default values. We'll use the current files to continue working. If you have installed Connector/Net you can skip this step, if you don't have installed but you're planning to do it, please install it and continue with the next step. If you're using the No Install version of Connector/Net we'll need to add the references to our project, the assemblies needed are: MySql.Data, MySql.Data.Entities and MySql.Web. Be sure that the assemblies chosen match the Net Framework version used in our project and the MySql.Data.Entities is compatible with EF5 (EF5 is the default added by the project). Now open the “web.config” file, and under the <connectionStrings> node add a connection string that points to a MySql instance. We'll use the following connection configuration: <add name="MyConnection" connectionString="server=localhost;UserId=root;password=pass;database=MySqlSimpleMembership;" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient"/> Under the node <system.web> we'll add the following configuration: <membership defaultProvider="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider"><providers><clear/><add name="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider" type="MySql.Web.Security.MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider,MySql.Web,Version=6.9.3.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="MySqlSimpleMembershipTest" description="MySQLdefaultapplication" connectionStringName="MyConnection"  userTableName="UserProfile" userIdColumn="UserId" userNameColumn="UserName" autoGenerateTables="True"/></providers></membership> In the previous configuration the mandatory properties are: connectionStringName, userTableName, userIdColumn, userNameColumn and autoGenerateTables. If the other properties are not provided a default value is set to it but if the mandatory properties are not set a ProviderException will be thrown. The valid properties for the MySqlSimpleMembership are the same used for MySqlMembership plus the mandatory fields. UserTableName: Name of the table where will be stored the user, this table is independent from the schema generated by the provider and can be edited later by the user. UserId: name of the column that will store the id for the records in the userTableName. UserName : name of the column that will store the name/user for the records in the userTableName. The connectionStringName property must match a connection string defined in web.config file. Once the configuration is done in web.config, we need to be sure that our database context for the Users Table point to the right connection string. In our case we just need to update the class UsersContext in the file AcountModel.cs in the Models folder. The file also contains the UserProfile class which match the configuration for our UserTable. Other class that needs to be updated is the SimpleMembershipInitializer in the file InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs in the Filters folder. In that class we'll see a call to the method “WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection”, in that call is where we need to update the parameters to match our configuration. If the database that you configure in your connection string doesn't exists, you need to create it empty. Now we're ready to run our web application, press F5 or the Run button in the tool bar. You'll see the following screen: If you go to your database used by the application you'll see some tables created, now we are using SimpleMembership. Now create a user, click on “Register” at the top-right in the web page. Type your user name and password, then click on “Register”. You'll be redirected to the home page and you'll see the name of your user at the top-right page. If you take a look on the tables just created in your database you will find the data about the user you just register. In our case the tables that contains the information are UserProfile and Webpages_Membership.  Configuring OAuth Other option to access your website will be using OAuth, so you can validate an user using an external account like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In this post we'll enable the authentication for Google account in our application. Go to the class AuthConfig.cs in the folder App_Start. In the method “RegisterAuth” uncomment the last line where is the call to the method “OauthWebSecurity.RegisterGoogleClient”. Run the application. Once the application is running click on “Login”. You will see at the right side the option to login using a Google account, click on “Google”.  You will be asked for Google credentials. If your login is successful you'll see a message asking for your approval to give permission to your site to access your information. Click on “Accept”. Now a page to register your user will be shown, click on “Register”. Now your new user is logged in in your application. You can take a look of the user information created in the tables  UserProfile and Webpages_OauthMembership. If you want to use another external option to authenticate users you must enable the client in the same class where we enable the Google authentication, but for others providers is mandatory to register your Application in their site. Once you have register your application they will give you a token/key and the id for your application, that information you're going to use it to register the client. Thanks for reading.

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• Simplifying Human Capital Management with Mobile Applications

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Aaron Green If you're starting to think 'mobility' is a recurring theme in your reading, you'd be right. For those who haven't started to build organisational capabilities to leverage it, it's fair to say you're late to the party. The good news: better late than never. Research firm eMarketer says the worldwide smartphone audience will total 1.75 billion this year, while communications technology and services provider Ericsson suggests smartphones will triple to 5.6 billion globally by 2019. It should be no surprise, smart phone adoption is reaching the farthest corners of the globe; the subsequent impact of enterprise applications enabled by these devices is driving business performance improvement and will continue to do so. Companies using advanced workforce analytics can add significantly to the bottom line, while impacting customer satisfaction, quality and productivity. It's a statement that makes most business leaders sit forward in their chairs. Achieving these three standards is like sipping The Golden Elixir for the business world. No-one would argue their importance. So what are 'advanced workforce analytics?' Simply, they're unprecedented access to workforce trends and performance markers. Many are made possible by a mobile world and the enterprise applications that come with it on smart devices. Some refer to it as 'the consumerisation of IT'. As this phenomenon has matured and become more widely appreciated it has impacted the spectrum of functional units within an enterprise differently, but powerfully. Whether it's sales, HR, marketing, IT, or operations, all have benefited from a more mobile approach. It has been the catalyst for improvement in, and management of, the employee experience. The net result of which is happier customers. The obvious benefits but the lesser realised impact Most people understand that mobility allows for greater efficiency and productivity, collaboration and flexibility, but how that translates into business outcomes within the various functional groups is lesser known. In actuality mobility has helped galvanise partnerships between cross-functional groups within the enterprise. Where in some quarters it was once feared mobility could fragment a workforce, its rallying cry of support is coming from what you might describe as an unlikely source - HR. As the bedrock of an enterprise, it is conceivable HR might contemplate the possible negative impact of a mobile workforce that no-longer sits in an office, at the same desks every day. After all, who would know what they were doing or saying? How would they collaborate? It's reasonable to see why HR might have a legitimate claim to try and retain as much 'perceived control' as possible. The reality however is mobility has emancipated human capital and its management. Mobility and enterprise applications are expediting decision making. Google calls it Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT. It enables smoother operation and can contribute to faster growth. From a collaborative perspective, with the growing use of enterprise social media, which in many cases is being driven by HR, workforce planning and the tangible impact of change is much easier to map. This in turn provides a platform from which individuals and teams can thrive. With more agility and ability to anticipate, staff satisfaction and retention is higher, and real time feedback constant. The management team can save time, energy and costs with more accurate data, which is then intelligently applied across the workforce to truly engage with staff, customers and partners. From a human capital management (HCM) perspective, mobility can help you close the loop on true talent management. It can enhance what managers can offer and what employees can provide in return. It can create nested relationships and powerful partnerships. IT and HR - partners and stewards of mobility One effect of enterprise mobility is an evolution in the nature of the relationship between HR and IT from one of service provision to partnership. The reason for the dynamic shift is largely due to the 'bring your own device' (BYOD) movement, which is transitioning to a 'bring your own application' (BYOA) scenario. As enterprise technology has in some ways reverse-engineered its solutions to help manage this situation, the partnership between IT (the functional owner) and HR (the strategic enabler) is deeply entrenched. And it has to be. The CIO and the HR leader are faced with compliance and regulatory issues and concerns around information security and personal privacy on a daily basis, complicated by global reach and varied domestic legislation. There are tens of thousands of new mobile apps entering the market each month and, unlike many consumer applications which get downloaded but are often never opened again after initial perusal, enterprise applications are being relied upon by functional groups, not least by HR to enhance people management. It requires a systematic approach across all applications in use within the enterprise in order to ensure they're used to best effect. No turning back, and no desire to With real time analytics on performance and the ability for immediate feedback, there is no turning back for managers. In my experience with Oracle, our customers' operational efficiency is at record levels. It's clear as a result of the combination of individual KPIs and organisational goals, CIOs have been able to give HR leaders the ability to build predictive models that feed into an enterprise organisations' evolving strategy. It also helps them ensure regulatory compliance much more easily. Once an arduous task, with mobile enabled automation and quality data, compliance is simpler. Their world has changed for the better. For the CIO, mobility also assists them to optimise performance. While it doesn't come without challenges, mobile-enabled applications and the native experience users have with them means employees don't need high-level technical expertise to train users. It reduces the training and engagement required from the IT team so they can focus on other things that deliver value to the bottom line; all the while lowering the cost of assets and related maintenance work by simplifying processes. Rewards of a mobile enterprise outweigh risks With mobile tools allowing us to increasingly integrate our personal and professional lives, terms like "office hours" are becoming irrelevant, so work/life balance is a cultural must. Enterprises are expected to offer tools that enable workers to access information from anywhere, at any time, from any device. Employees want simplicity and convenience but it doesn't stop at private enterprise. This is a societal shift. Governments, which traditionally have been known to be slower to adopt newer technology, are also offering support for local businesses to go mobile. Several state government websites have advice on how to create mobile apps and more. And as recently as last week the Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips unveiled his State government's ICT roadmap for the next two years, which details an increased use of the public cloud, as well as mobile communications, and improved access to online data-sets. Tech giants are investing significantly in solutions designed to simplify mobile deployment and enablement. The mobility trend is creating a wave of change in the industry and driving transformation in the enterprise. If you're not on that wave, the business risk continues to rise as your competitiveness drops. Aaron is the Vice President of HCM Strategy at Oracle Corporation where he is responsible for researching and identifying emerging trends in the practice of Human Resources and works to deliver industry-leading technology solutions. Other responsibilities include, ownership of Oracle's innovative HCM solutions across JAPAC and enabling organisations to transform and modernise their workforce tools. Follow him on Twitter @aaronjgreen

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class (and a few helpers) with the following operation: Right click on the Solution and select Add, New Item from the context menu. From the dialog, select a Basic Page (not a Blank Page, which is another vanilla page). If you prefer, you can also use Split Page, Items Page, Item Detail Page, Grouped Items Page or Group Detail Page which are all LayoutAwarePages. Personally I like to start with a Basic Page, which gives me more creative freedom. Adding this new page will cause Visual Studio to show a prompt asking you for permission to add additional helper files to the Common folder. One of these helpers in the LayoutAwarePage class, which is where the magic happens. LayoutAwarePage offers some help for the detection of orientation and state (which makes it a pleasure to design for all these scenarios in Blend, by the way) as well as storage for the navigation state (more about that in a future article). Issue with LayoutAwarePage When you use UI elements such as a background picture, a watermark label, logos, etc, it is quite common to do a few things with those: Making them partially transparent (this is especially true for background pictures; for instance I really like a black Page background with a half transparent picture placed on top of it). Transforming them, for instance rotating them a bit, scaling them, etc. Here is an example with a picture of my two beautiful daughters in the Bird Park in Kuala Lumpur, as well as a transformed TextBlock. The image has an opacity of 40% and the TextBlock a simple RotateTransform. If I create an application with a MainPage that navigates to this LayoutAwarePage, however, I will have a very annoying effect: The background picture appears with an Opacity of 100%. The TextBlock is not rotated. This lasts only for less than a second (during the navigation animation) before the elements “snap into place” and get their desired effect. Here is the XAML that cause the annoying effect: <common:LayoutAwarePage x:Name="pageRoot" x:Class="App13.BasicPage1" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:common="using:App13.Common" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" Grid.RowSpan="2" /> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" Grid.Row="1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> </Grid> </common:LayoutAwarePage> Solving the issue In order to solve this “snapping” issue, the solution is to wrap the elements that are transformed into an empty Grid. Honestly, to me it sounds like a bug in the LayoutAwarePage navigation animation, but thankfully the workaround is not that difficult: Simple change the main Grid as follows: <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid Grid.RowSpan="2"> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" /> </Grid> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <Grid Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> </Grid> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </Grid> Hopefully this will help a few people, I banged my head on the wall for a while before someone at Microsoft pointed me to the solution ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 2 of 3&ndash;Setup)

  - by ToStringTheory

  Welcome to part two in my series covering the LESS CSS language.  In the first post, I covered the two major CSS precompiled languages - LESS and SASS to a small extent, iterating over some of the features that you could expect to find in them.  In this post, I will go a little further in depth into the setup and execution of using the LESS framework. Introduction It really doesn’t take too much to get LESS working in your project.  The basic workflow will be including the necessary translator in your project, defining bundles for the LESS files, add the necessary code to your layouts.cshtml file, and finally add in all your necessary styles to the LESS files!  Lets get started… New Project Just like all great experiments in Visual Studio, start up a File > New Project, and create a new MVC 4 Web Application.  The Base Package After you have the new project spun up, use the Nuget Package Manager to install the Bundle Transformer: LESS package. This will take care of installing the main translator that we will be using for LESS code (dotless which is another Nuget package), as well as the core framework for the Bundle Transformer library.  The installation will come up with some instructions in a readme file on how to modify your web.config to handle all your *.less requests through the Bundle Transformer, which passes the translating onto dotless. Where To Put These LESS Files?! This step isn’t really a requirement, however I find that I don’t like how ASP.Net MVC just has a content directory where they store CSS, content images, css images….  In my project, I went ahead and created a new directory just for styles – LESS files, CSS files, and images that are only referenced in LESS or CSS.  Ignore the MVC directory as this was my testbed for another project I was working on at the same time.  As you can see here, I have: A top level directory for images which contains only images used in a page A top level directory for scripts A top level directory for Styles A few directories for plugins I am using (Colrizr, JQueryUI, Farbtastic) Multiple *.less files for different functions (I’ll go over these in a minute) I find that this layout offers the best separation of content types.  Bring Out Your Bundles! The next thing that we need to do is add in the necessary code for the bundling of these LESS files.  Go ahead and open your BundleConfig.cs file, usually located in the /App_Start/ folder of the project.  As you will see in a minute, instead of using the method Microsoft does in the base MVC 4 project, I change things up a bit.  Define Constants The first thing I do is define constants for each of the virtual paths that will be used in the bundler: The main reason is that I hate magic strings in my program, so the fact that you first defined a virtual path in the BundleConfig file, and then used that path in the _Layout.cshtml file really irked me. Add Bundles to the BundleCollection Next, I am going to define the bundles for my styles in my AddStyleBundles method: That is all it takes to get all of my styles in play with LESS.  The CssTransformer and NullOrderer types come from the Bundle Transformer we grabbed earlier.  If we didn’t use that package, we would have to write our own function (not too hard, but why do it if it’s been done). I use the site.less file as my main hub for LESS - I will cover that more in the next section. Add Bundles To Layout.cshtml File With the constants in the BundleConfig file, instead of having to use the same magic string I defined for the bundle virtual path, I am able to do this: Notice here that besides the RenderSection magic strings (something I am working on in another side project), all of the bundles are now based on const strings.  If I need to change the virtual path, I only have to do it in one place.  Nifty! Get Started! We are now ready to roll!  As I said in the previous section, I use the site.less file as a central hub for my styles: As seen here, I have a reset.css file which is a simple CSS reset.  Next, I have created a file for managing all my color variables – colors.less: Here, you can see some of the standards I started to use, in this case for color variables.  I define all color variables with the @col prefix.  Currently, I am going for verbose variable names. The next file imported is my font.less file that defines the typeface information for the site: Simple enough.  A couple of imports for fonts from Google, and then declaring variables for use throughout LESS.  I also set up the heading sizes, margins, etc..  You can also see my current standardization for font declaration strings – @font. Next, I pull in a mixins.less file that I grabbed from the Twitter Bootstrap library that gives some useful parameterized mixins for use such as border-radius, gradient, box-shadow, etc… The common.less file is a file that just contains items that I will be defining that can be used across all my LESS files.  Kind of like my own mixins or font-helpers: Finally I have my layout.less file that contains all of my definitions for general site layout – width, main/sidebar widths, footer layout, etc: That’s it!  For the rest of my one off definitions/corrections, I am currently putting them into the site.less file beneath my original imports Note Probably my favorite side effect of using the LESS handler/translator while bundling is that it also does a CSS checkup when rendering…  See, when your web.config is set to debug, bundling will output the url to the direct less file, not the bundle, and the http handler intercepts the call, compiles the less, and returns the result.  If there is an error in your LESS code, the CSS file can be returned empty, or may have the error output as a comment on the first couple lines. If you have the web.config set to not debug, then if there is an error in your code, you will end up with the usual ASP.Net exception page (unless you catch the exception of course), with information regarding the failure of the conversion, such as brace mismatch, undefined variable, etc…  I find it nifty. Conclusion This is really just the beginning.  LESS is very powerful and exciting!  My next post will show an actual working example of why LESS is so powerful with its functions and variables…  At least I hope it will!  As for now, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on my current practice, I would love to hear them!  Feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email using the contact page.  In the mean time, I plan on posting the final post in this series tomorrow or the day after, with my side project, as well as a whole base ASP.Net MVC4 templated project with LESS added in it so that you can check out the layout I have in this post.  Until next time…

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• LinkedIn API returns 'Unauthorized' response (PHP OAuth)

  - by Jim Greenleaf

  I've been struggling with this one for a few days now. I've got a test app set up to connect to LinkedIn via OAuth. I want to be able to update a user's status, but at the moment I'm unable to interact with LinkedIn's API at all. I am able to successfully get a requestToken, then an accessToken, but when I issue a request to the API, I see an 'unauthorized' error that looks something like this: object(OAuthException)#2 (8) { ["message:protected"]=> string(73) "Invalid auth/bad request (got a 401, expected HTTP/1.1 20X or a redirect)" ["string:private"]=> string(0) "" ["code:protected"]=> int(401) ["file:protected"]=> string(47) "/home/pmfeorg/public_html/dev/test/linkedin.php" ["line:protected"]=> int(48) ["trace:private"]=> array(1) { [0]=> array(6) { ["file"]=> string(47) "/home/pmfeorg/public_html/dev/test/linkedin.php" ["line"]=> int(48) ["function"]=> string(5) "fetch" ["class"]=> string(5) "OAuth" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(2) { [0]=> string(35) "http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~" [1]=> string(3) "GET" } } } ["lastResponse"]=> string(358) " 401 1276375790558 0000 [unauthorized]. OAU:Bhgk3fB4cs9t4oatSdv538tD2X68-1OTCBg-KKL3pFBnGgOEhJZhFOf1n9KtHMMy|48032b2d-bc8c-4744-bb84-4eab53578c11|*01|*01:1276375790:xmc3lWhXJvLSUZh4dxMtrf55VVQ= " ["debugInfo"]=> array(5) { ["sbs"]=> string(329) "GET&http%3A%2F%2Fapi.linkedin.com%2Fv1%2Fpeople%2F~&oauth_consumer_key%3DBhgk3fB4cs9t4oatSdv538tD2X68-1OTCBg-KKL3pFBnGgOEhJZhFOf1n9KtHMMy%26oauth_nonce%3D7068001084c13f2ee6a2117.22312548%26oauth_signature_method%3DHMAC-SHA1%26oauth_timestamp%3D1276375790%26oauth_token%3D48032b2d-bc8c-4744-bb84-4eab53578c11%26oauth_version%3D1.0" ["headers_sent"]=> string(401) "GET /v1/people/~?GET&oauth_consumer_key=Bhgk3fB4cs9t4oatSdv538tD2X68-1OTCBg-KKL3pFBnGgOEhJZhFOf1n9KtHMMy&oauth_signature_method=HMAC-SHA1&oauth_nonce=7068001084c13f2ee6a2117.22312548&oauth_timestamp=1276375790&oauth_version=1.0&oauth_token=48032b2d-bc8c-4744-bb84-4eab53578c11&oauth_signature=xmc3lWhXJvLSUZh4dxMtrf55VVQ%3D HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: PECL-OAuth/1.0-dev Host: api.linkedin.com Accept: */*" ["headers_recv"]=> string(148) "HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:49:50 GMT Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 358" ["body_recv"]=> string(358) " 401 1276375790558 0000 [unauthorized]. OAU:Bhgk3fB4cs9t4oatSdv538tD2X68-1OTCBg-KKL3pFBnGgOEhJZhFOf1n9KtHMMy|48032b2d-bc8c-4744-bb84-4eab53578c11|*01|*01:1276375790:xmc3lWhXJvLSUZh4dxMtrf55VVQ= " ["info"]=> string(216) "About to connect() to api.linkedin.com port 80 (#0) Trying 64.74.98.83... connected Connected to api.linkedin.com (64.74.98.83) port 80 (#0) Connection #0 to host api.linkedin.com left intact Closing connection #0 " } } My code looks like this (based on the FireEagle example from php.net): $req_url = 'https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/requestToken'; $authurl = 'https://www.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/authenticate'; $acc_url = 'https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/accessToken'; $api_url = 'http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~'; $callback = 'http://www.pmfe.org/dev/test/linkedin.php'; $conskey = 'Bhgk3fB4cs9t4oatSdv538tD2X68-1OTCBg-KKL3pFBnGgOEhJZhFOf1n9KtHMMy'; $conssec = '####################SECRET KEY#####################'; session_start(); try { $oauth = new OAuth($conskey,$conssec,OAUTH_SIG_METHOD_HMACSHA1,OAUTH_AUTH_TYPE_URI); $oauth->enableDebug(); if(!isset($_GET['oauth_token'])) { $request_token_info = $oauth->getRequestToken($req_url); $_SESSION['secret'] = $request_token_info['oauth_token_secret']; header('Location: '.$authurl.'?oauth_token='.$request_token_info['oauth_token']); exit; } else { $oauth->setToken($_GET['oauth_token'],$_SESSION['secret']); $access_token_info = $oauth->getAccessToken($acc_url); $_SESSION['token'] = $access_token_info['oauth_token']; $_SESSION['secret'] = $access_token_info['oauth_token_secret']; } $oauth->setToken($_SESSION['token'],$_SESSION['secret']); $oauth->fetch($api_url, OAUTH_HTTP_METHOD_GET); $response = $oauth->getLastResponse(); } catch(OAuthException $E) { var_dump($E); } I've successfully set up a connection to Twitter and one to Facebook using OAuth, but LinkedIn keeps eluding me. If anyone could offer some advice or point me in the right direction, I will be extremely appreciative!

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• How to solve this error that is shown on Windbg?

  - by aF

  Hello, I've loaded a .exe and it gave this error: Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 6.12.0002.633 X86 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. CommandLine: "C:\Users\Public\SoundLog\Code\Código Python\SoundLog\dist\SoundLog.exe" Symbol search path is: *** Invalid *** **************************************************************************** * Symbol loading may be unreliable without a symbol search path. * * Use .symfix to have the debugger choose a symbol path. * * After setting your symbol path, use .reload to refresh symbol locations. * **************************************************************************** Executable search path is: ModLoad: 00400000 0061c000 image00400000 ModLoad: 771a0000 772dc000 ntdll.dll ModLoad: 76e10000 76ee4000 C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll ModLoad: 75460000 754aa000 C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll ModLoad: 76550000 76619000 C:\Windows\system32\USER32.dll ModLoad: 76b30000 76b7e000 C:\Windows\system32\GDI32.dll ModLoad: 77310000 7731a000 C:\Windows\system32\LPK.dll ModLoad: 76ef0000 76f8d000 C:\Windows\system32\USP10.dll ModLoad: 75650000 756fc000 C:\Windows\system32\msvcrt.dll ModLoad: 65ee0000 65f83000 C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.vc90.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4926_none_508ed732bcbc0e5a\MSVCR90.dll (c8.704): Break instruction exception - code 80000003 (first chance) eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=0012fb0c edx=771e64f4 esi=fffffffe edi=00000000 eip=7723e60e esp=0012fb28 ebp=0012fb54 iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00000246 *** ERROR: Symbol file could not be found. Defaulted to export symbols for ntdll.dll - ntdll!LdrVerifyImageMatchesChecksum+0x633: 7723e60e cc int 3 0:000> g Then I pressed F5 and while executing the program gave me this error (this one is what I need to solve): ModLoad: 6f980000 6ff11000 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorwks.dll ModLoad: 6f8e0000 6f97b000 C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.vc80.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4927_none_d08a205e442db5b5\MSVCR80.dll ModLoad: 752f0000 752fb000 C:\Windows\system32\profapi.dll ModLoad: 6e670000 6f168000 C:\Windows\assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.50727_32\mscorlib\8c1770d45c63cf5c462eeb945ef9aa5d\mscorlib.ni.dll ModLoad: 03d90000 03dac000 SoundLogC++WrapperDLL.dll ModLoad: 03db0000 03dcc000 SoundLogC++WrapperDLL.dll ModLoad: 6afa0000 6affb000 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorjit.dll ModLoad: 04dd0000 04e13000 msvcm90.dll ModLoad: 04e20000 04e63000 msvcm90.dll ModLoad: 76aa0000 76b23000 C:\Windows\system32\CLBCatQ.DLL ModLoad: 75280000 752df000 C:\Windows\system32\sxs.dll ModLoad: 60340000 60348000 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\culture.dll (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): CLR exception - code e0434f4d (first chance) (b78.9c8): CLR exception - code e0434f4d (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): C++ EH exception - code e06d7363 (first chance) (b78.9c8): CLR exception - code e0434f4d (!!! second chance !!!) eax=0012e2a4 ebx=e0434f4d ecx=00000001 edx=00000000 esi=0012e32c edi=002bada0 eip=75469617 esp=0012e2a4 ebp=0012e2f4 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz ac po nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00000212 *** ERROR: Symbol file could not be found. Defaulted to export symbols for C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll - KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x54: 75469617 c9 leave Can anyone tell me what is this and how can I solve it?

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• Django: What's an awesome plugin to maintain images in the admin?

  - by meder

  I have an articles entry model and I have an excerpt and description field. If a user wants to post an image then I have a separate ImageField which has the default standard file browser. I've tried using django-filebrowser but I don't like the fact that it requires django-grappelli nor do I necessarily want a flash upload utility - can anyone recommend a tool where I can manage image uploads, and basically replace the file browse provided by django with an imagepicking browser? In the future I'd probably want it to handle image resizing and specify default image sizes for certain article types. Edit: I'm trying out adminfiles now but I'm having issues installing it. I grabbed it and added it to my python path, added it to INSTALLED_APPS, created the databases for it, uploaded an image. I followed the instructions to modify my Model to specify adminfiles_fields and registered but it's not applying in my admin, here's my admin.py for articles: from django.contrib import admin from django import forms from articles.models import Category, Entry from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE from adminfiles.admin import FilePickerAdmin class EntryForm( forms.ModelForm ): class Media: js = ['/media/tinymce/tiny_mce.js', '/media/tinymce/load.js']#, '/media/admin/filebrowser/js/TinyMCEAdmin.js'] class Meta: model = Entry class CategoryAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): prepopulated_fields = { 'slug': ['title'] } class EntryAdmin( FilePickerAdmin ): adminfiles_fields = ('excerpt',) prepopulated_fields = { 'slug': ['title'] } form = EntryForm admin.site.register( Category, CategoryAdmin ) admin.site.register( Entry, EntryAdmin ) Here's my Entry model: class Entry( models.Model ): LIVE_STATUS = 1 DRAFT_STATUS = 2 HIDDEN_STATUS = 3 STATUS_CHOICES = ( ( LIVE_STATUS, 'Live' ), ( DRAFT_STATUS, 'Draft' ), ( HIDDEN_STATUS, 'Hidden' ), ) status = models.IntegerField( choices=STATUS_CHOICES, default=LIVE_STATUS ) tags = TagField() categories = models.ManyToManyField( Category ) title = models.CharField( max_length=250 ) excerpt = models.TextField( blank=True ) excerpt_html = models.TextField(editable=False, blank=True) body_html = models.TextField( editable=False, blank=True ) article_image = models.ImageField(blank=True, upload_to='upload') body = models.TextField() enable_comments = models.BooleanField(default=True) pub_date = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now) slug = models.SlugField(unique_for_date='pub_date') author = models.ForeignKey(User) featured = models.BooleanField(default=False) def save( self, force_insert=False, force_update= False): self.body_html = markdown(self.body) if self.excerpt: self.excerpt_html = markdown( self.excerpt ) super( Entry, self ).save( force_insert, force_update ) class Meta: ordering = ['-pub_date'] verbose_name_plural = "Entries" def __unicode__(self): return self.title Edit #2: To clarify I did move the media files to my media path and they are indeed rendering the image area, I can upload fine, the <<<image>>> tag is inserted into my editable MarkItUp w/ Markdown area but it isn't rendering in the MarkItUp preview - perhaps I just need to apply the |upload_tags into that preview. I'll try adding it to my template which posts the article as well.

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• Spam Activity From my computer

  - by Bnymn

  I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 64bit. I'm using HTTP proxy over ssh as mentioned here. If I do not start TinyProxy, everything is OK. But, when I start TinyProxy, I'm getting the following. I think there is an application running on my machine and watching the proxy to start. But I could not decide which one it could be. ps ax PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 1 ? Ss 0:01 /sbin/init 2 ? S 0:00 [kthreadd] 3 ? S 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0] 6 ? S 0:00 [migration/0] 7 ? S 0:00 [watchdog/0] 21 ? S< 0:00 [cpuset] 22 ? S< 0:00 [khelper] 23 ? S 0:00 [kdevtmpfs] 24 ? S< 0:00 [netns] 26 ? S 0:00 [sync_supers] 27 ? S 0:00 [bdi-default] 28 ? S< 0:00 [kintegrityd] 29 ? S< 0:00 [kblockd] 30 ? S< 0:00 [ata_sff] 31 ? S 0:00 [khubd] 32 ? S< 0:00 [md] 34 ? S 0:00 [khungtaskd] 35 ? S 0:00 [kswapd0] 36 ? SN 0:00 [ksmd] 37 ? SN 0:00 [khugepaged] 38 ? S 0:00 [fsnotify_mark] 39 ? S 0:00 [ecryptfs-kthrea] 40 ? S< 0:00 [crypto] 48 ? S< 0:00 [kthrotld] 49 ? S 0:00 [scsi_eh_0] 50 ? S 0:00 [scsi_eh_1] 51 ? S 0:00 [scsi_eh_2] 52 ? S 0:00 [scsi_eh_3] 75 ? S< 0:00 [devfreq_wq] 240 ? S< 0:00 [xfs_mru_cache] 241 ? S< 0:00 [xfslogd] 242 ? S< 0:00 [xfsdatad] 243 ? S< 0:00 [xfsconvertd] 245 ? S 0:00 [xfsbufd/sda3] 246 ? S 0:01 [xfsaild/sda3] 330 ? S 0:00 upstart-udev-bridge --daemon 333 ? Ss 0:00 /sbin/udevd --daemon 472 ? S< 0:00 [cfg80211] 479 ? S< 0:00 [kpsmoused] 671 ? S 0:00 upstart-socket-bridge --daemon 779 ? S 0:00 [xfsbufd/sda4] 781 ? S 0:01 [xfsaild/sda4] 785 ? S< 0:00 [ttm_swap] 800 ? S< 0:00 [hd-audio0] 803 ? S< 0:00 [hd-audio1] 857 ? Sl 0:00 rsyslogd -c5 869 ? Ss 0:04 dbus-daemon --system --fork --activation=upstart 881 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/modem-manager 883 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/bluetoothd 905 ? Ssl 0:02 NetworkManager 906 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/cupsd -F 910 ? Sl 0:02 /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkitd --no-debug 918 ? S 0:00 avahi-daemon: running [bunyamin-hp.local] 919 ? S 0:00 avahi-daemon: chroot helper 920 ? S< 0:00 [krfcommd] 956 ? Ss 0:00 /sbin/wpa_supplicant -B -P /run/sendsigs.omit.d/wpasupplicant.pid -u -s -O /var/run/wpa_supplicant 980 tty4 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty4 985 tty5 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty5 1000 tty2 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty2 1006 tty3 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty3 1009 tty6 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty6 1024 ? Ss 0:00 acpid -c /etc/acpi/events -s /var/run/acpid.socket 1025 ? Ss 0:00 atd 1026 ? Ss 0:00 cron 1029 ? Ss 0:01 /usr/sbin/irqbalance 1034 ? Ssl 0:00 whoopsie 1091 ? Ssl 0:00 lightdm 1216 tty1 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1 1224 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon 1241 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon 1356 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/upower/upowerd 1447 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/colord/colord 1539 ? SNl 0:00 /usr/lib/rtkit/rtkit-daemon 1723 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/udisks/udisks-daemon 1724 ? S 0:00 udisks-daemon: not polling any devices 2077 ? Z 0:00 [lightdm] <defunct> 2433 ? Z 0:00 [lightdm] <defunct> 3491 ? S 0:00 [flush-8:0] 4023 ? S 0:00 [kworker/u:14] 4034 ? S 0:00 [migration/1] 4035 ? S 0:00 [kworker/1:3] 4036 ? S 0:00 [ksoftirqd/1] 4037 ? S 0:00 [watchdog/1] 4038 ? S 0:00 [migration/2] 4040 ? S 0:00 [ksoftirqd/2] 4041 ? S 0:00 [watchdog/2] 4042 ? S 0:00 [migration/3] 4043 ? S 0:00 [kworker/3:1] 4044 ? S 0:00 [ksoftirqd/3] 4045 ? S 0:00 [watchdog/3] 4047 ? S 0:00 [irq/43-mei] 4070 ? S 0:00 [kworker/3:0] 4072 ? S 0:00 [kworker/1:0] 4164 ? Ss 0:00 anacron -s 4549 tty7 Ss+ 1:13 /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch 4683 ? Sl 0:00 lightdm --session-child 12 47 4718 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --daemonize --login 4729 ? Ssl 0:00 gnome-session --session=gnome-fallback 4765 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=gnome-fallback 4768 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=gnome-fallback 4769 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session 4779 ? Sl 0:01 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon 4786 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd 4788 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfs-fuse-daemon -f /home/bunyamin/.gvfs 4797 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-printer 4799 ? Sl 0:03 metacity 4805 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gconf/gconfd-2 4811 ? Sl 0:10 gnome-panel 4814 ? S 0:00 syndaemon -i 2.0 -K -R -t 4819 ? S<l 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog 4821 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/dconf/dconf-service 4826 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-fallback-mount-helper 4828 ? Sl 0:06 nautilus -n 4830 ? Sl 0:02 nm-applet 4832 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 4835 ? Sl 0:00 bluetooth-applet 4851 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper 4854 ? Sl 0:04 /usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet-complete 4859 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor 4863 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor 4865 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-afc-volume-monitor 4871 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/0 4874 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-application/indicator-application-service 4876 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-datetime/indicator-datetime-service 4878 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-messages/indicator-messages-service 4887 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-printers/indicator-printers-service 4888 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-session/indicator-session-service 4889 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/indicator-sound/indicator-sound-service 4906 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/geoclue/geoclue-master 4929 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/ubuntu-geoip/ubuntu-geoip-provider 4938 ? Sl 0:11 /usr/lib/gnome-applets/multiload-applet-2 4939 ? Sl 0:01 /usr/lib/gnome-applets/cpufreq-applet 4953 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-metadata 4955 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-burn --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1 4957 ? Sl 3:22 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 4973 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/at-spi2-core/at-spi-bus-launcher 4997 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-disk-utility/gdu-notification-daemon 5000 ? Sl 0:00 telepathy-indicator 5007 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5 5012 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-online-accounts/goa-daemon 5018 ? Sl 0:00 gnome-screensaver 5019 ? Sl 0:01 zeitgeist-datahub 5025 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/bin/zeitgeist-daemon 5033 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-fts 5041 ? S 0:00 /bin/cat 5052 ? Sl 0:08 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal -x /bin/sh -c '/home/bunyamin/Desktop/SSH Tunnel' 5058 ? S 0:00 gnome-pty-helper 5067 ? Sl 0:00 update-notifier 5090 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/system-service/system-service-d 5130 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/deja-dup/deja-dup/deja-dup-monitor 5135 ? S 0:00 /bin/sh -c nice run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily 5136 ? SN 0:00 run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily 5358 pts/4 Ss 0:00 bash 5482 ? S 0:00 [kworker/0:1] 5487 ? S 0:01 [kworker/2:0] 5550 ? Sl 1:15 /usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so -greomni /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja 4957 true plugin 5717 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/cups/notifier/dbus dbus:// 5824 ? SN 0:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/update-notifier-common 5825 ? SN 0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader 5872 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/notify-osd/notify-osd 5888 ? S 0:00 /sbin/udevd --daemon 5889 ? S 0:00 /sbin/udevd --daemon 5909 ? S 0:00 /sbin/dhclient -d -4 -sf /usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action -pf /var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dhclient-eth1.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient-f5f0 5912 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127. 5975 pts/1 Ss+ 0:00 /bin/sh -c '/home/bunyamin/Desktop/SSH Tunnel' 5976 pts/1 S+ 0:00 /bin/sh /home/bunyamin/Desktop/SSH Tunnel 5977 pts/1 S+ 0:00 ssh -p443 [email protected] -L 8000:127.0.0.1:8000 5980 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-http --spawner :1.6 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/2 6034 ? S 0:00 [kworker/u:0] 6054 ? S 0:00 [kworker/2:2] 6070 ? S 0:00 [kworker/0:3] 6094 ? Sl 0:02 gedit /home/bunyamin/Desktop/a.html 6101 ? S 0:00 [kworker/0:2] 6130 pts/4 R+ 0:00 ps ax TinyProxy LOG connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 mx1.u4gf.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=2959021&T=3&_salt=1516586745&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunshinefelling.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D45%253Aplus-size-dresses%26id%3D7512%253A2012-01-25-22-42-00%26format%3Dpdf%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D101&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye bye bye connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 connect to ad.bharatstudent.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 142.91.199.250.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=2913320&_salt=2228719469&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 173.208.94.117 - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3187816&_salt=462045326&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - mx1.a54m.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=2887338&T=3&_salt=2925281520&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsecretskirt.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_contact%26view%3Dcontact%26id%3D1%26Itemid%3D95&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 108.62.75.54.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3218437&T=3&_salt=2939054384&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vifinances.com%2Ffinance-investing%2Finsurance-investment%2Fis-life-insurance-investment-necessarily-the-way-to-go.html&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 connect to ad.globe7.com:80 bye connect to ad.globe7.com:80 connect to ad.globe7.com:80 bye 173.208.94.22 - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=2922824&T=3&_salt=705371051&B=12&m=2&u=%3A%2F%2Fsunshinefelling.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D44%3Amature-womens-fashion%26id%3D6917%3A2012-01-25-22-37-27%26tmpl%3Dcomponent%26print%3D1%26layout%3Ddefault%26page%3D&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 23.19.10.44.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=160x600&section=3512129&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye 142.91.189.27.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3660215&_salt=2921537966&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.scanmedios.com:80 bye 142.91.217.158.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globaltakeoff.net/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=160x600&section=2077929&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - 23.19.76.194.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=3127996&T=3&_salt=1952612979&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oseey.com%2Fpure-core-watch%2Fcarbon-fiber-watch%2Fcarbon-monoxide-poisoning-awareness.html&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - mx1.e6sb.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.scanmedios.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=3522638&T=3&_salt=3444993091&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunshinefelling.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D6013%3A2012-01-25-22-25-54%26catid%3D40%3Abig-beautiful-women-fashion%26Itemid%3D96&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.tagjunction.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 23.19.76.154.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=300x250&section=2569393 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ads.creafi-online-media.com:80 bye 108.62.109.115.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3315330&_salt=2385926515&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 142.91.217.214.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=3634166&T=3&_salt=1590442300&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwealthterritory.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_mailto%26tmpl%3Dcomponent%26link%3DaHR0cDovL3dlYWx0aHRlcnJpdG9yeS5jb20vaW5kZXgucGhwP29wdGlvbj1jb21fY29udGVudCZ2aWV3PWFydGljbGUmaWQ9NDY2NDoyMDExLTA3LTA2LTEzLTI2LTUwJmNhdGlkPTQxOnNlcnZpY2VzJkl0ZW1pZ&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 108.62.185.184.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ads.creafi-online-media.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=2885766&T=3&_salt=107120374&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Feconomicccore.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Dcategory%26layout%3Dblog%26id%3D48%26Itemid%3D98%26limitstart%3D45&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye bye bye connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 connect to ad.tagjunction.com:80 bye 108.62.75.252.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=728x90&section=3213387&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - bye connect to ad.tagjunction.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 173.208.94.29 - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=728x90&section=3006024&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - 23.19.31.84.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=2586703&_salt=2905995697&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - oxx-ef-Words.ipwagon.net - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3630499&_salt=4037530564&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 142.91.185.53.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3512541&_salt=1134875077&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.globe7.com:80 108.177.187.37.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3168350&T=3&_salt=548860046&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Flifehealthyliving.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D34%253Ahealthy-food%26id%3D4681%253A2012-05-16-20-40-19%26tmpl%3Dcomponent%26print%3D1%26layout%3Ddefault%26page%3D%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D53&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 bye connect to ads.creafi-online-media.com:80 108.177.223.180.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3331290&T=3&_salt=1270334669&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vegls.com%2Faccident-attorneys-firms%2Fauto-accident-attorney%2Ffind-the-correct-auto-accident-attorney.html&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 142.91.185.38.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=160x600&section=818253 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye bye bye 108.62.75.230.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ads.creafi-online-media.com/st?ad_type=pop&ad_size=0x0&section=3323456&banned_pop_types=29&pop_times=1&pop_frequency=86400&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 bye connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 bye 142.91.217.194.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3068801&T=3&_salt=1246107431&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmoodoffashionandbeauty.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D756%3A2011-07-13-13-13-43%26catid%3D36%3Afashion-clothes%26Itemid%3D55&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.smxchange.com:80 108.62.185.235.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=300x250&section=3307618&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.globe7.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye bye connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 108.177.168.183.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3582877&T=3&_salt=3271923155&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwomenhealthroad.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D5780%3A2011-12-12-16-56-53%26catid%3D40%3Ahealth-issues%26Itemid%3D96&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 23.19.3.100.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=2895969&T=3&_salt=207805714&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Feconomicccore.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D46%253Aeconomic-news%26id%3D6079%253A2011-09-29-07-39-13%26format%3Dpdf%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D96&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 142.91.199.212.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=300x250&section=2956039&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - bye 142.91.189.169.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=3004691&T=3&_salt=2747591679&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.qtsfinancial.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D5406%3Afinancial-statement-english-page%26catid%3D43%3Afinancial-analysis%26Itemid%3D99&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 23.19.31.58.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3323560&_salt=3172064457&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 iei-ix-Words.ipwagon.net - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=3187813&T=3&_salt=1110944041&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.workinhouses.com%2Fhtml%2Fwallingford-ct-connecticuts-best-places-for-your-home.html&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to cookex.amp.yahoo.com:80 173.208.94.116 - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=300x250&section=3213592&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - bye bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 connect to ads.creafi-online-media.com:80 bye 108.62.75.99.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=2913321&T=3&_salt=333033369&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Ffashionstreetlight.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D28850%3A2011-12-20-12-59-39%26catid%3D45%3Afashion-accessories%26Itemid%3D101&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 142.91.217.208.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://cookex.amp.yahoo.com/v2/cexposer/SIG=18kthu27g/*http%3A//ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=2682517&T=3&_salt=1378331643&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economicwindows.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D40%253Afinancial-info%26id%3D3854%253A2011-07-06-13-25-37%26format%3Dpdf%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D96&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye bye bye 108.62.185.228.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3315448&_salt=4241487555&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 108.62.185.220.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ads.creafi-online-media.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=728x90&section=3269968 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.tagjunction.com:80 bye connect to ad.globe7.com:80 bye 142.91.185.47.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/st?ad_type=pop&ad_size=0x0&section=2958317&banned_pop_types=29&pop_times=1&pop_frequency=0&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - bye 108.177.168.183.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=3582877&T=3&_salt=1313872999&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwomenhealthroad.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D5753%3A2011-12-12-16-56-46%26catid%3D40%3Ahealth-issues%26Itemid%3D96&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.tagjunction.com:80 bye connect to ad.globe7.com:80 bye connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 108.62.75.53.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.tagjunction.com/imp?Z=300x250&s=3127172&T=3&_salt=2152278771&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oslims.com%2Ffashion-coffee%2Ffashion-slimming-coffee%2Fso-whats-your-poison-coffee-or-tea.html&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye bye 108.62.75.170.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=2909210&_salt=1773835502&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - 23.19.79.3.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.globe7.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=728x90&section=3571505&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - 142.91.217.216.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=3630472&T=3&_salt=462936220&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economicwindows.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D41%253Afinancial-services%26id%3D4854%253A2011-07-06-13-26-56%26tmpl%3Dcomponent%26print%3D1%26layout%3Ddefault%26page%3D%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D97&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 142.91.189.176.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=3187822&T=3&_salt=325267799&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Feconomysea.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_mailto%26tmpl%3Dcomponent%26link%3DaHR0cDovL2Vjb25vbXlzZWEuY29tL2luZGV4LnBocD9vcHRpb249Y29tX2NvbnRlbnQmdmlldz1hcnRpY2xlJmlkPTYzNDk6MjAxMS0wOS0yOC0yMC0wNC0xOSZjYXRpZD00NzplY29ub21pYy1uZXdzJkl0ZW1pZD05Nw&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.adserverplus.com:80 142.91.190.240.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=2956040&T=3&_salt=3354730349&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdomarketings.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D279%3AWhy-Contractor-Leads-Are-Best-For-Getting-Ideal-Construction-Prospects%26catid%3D2%3Abusiness&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 108.62.75.6.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=3323456&T=3&_salt=1244915826&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdomarketings.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D989%3AThe-Basics-of-Failure-Mode-and-Effective-Analysis%26catid%3D2%3Abusiness&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye 142.91.217.220.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=728x90&s=2921135&T=3&_salt=1337464905&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Financezone.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D7236%3A2011-09-05-19-56-54%26catid%3D49%3Acareer-banking%26Itemid%3D99&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 108.62.178.229.rdns.ubiquityservers.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.adserverplus.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=160x600&section=3168350&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 108.177.168.187.rdns.ubiquity.io - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.smxchange.com/st?ad_type=iframe&ad_size=300x250&section=3285387&pop_nofreqcap=1&pub_url=${PUB_URL} HTTP/1.0" - - skg-wr-Words.ipwagon.net - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=0x0&y=29&s=3153972&_salt=3512711469&B=12&m=2&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - - bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 bye connect to ad.yieldmanager.com:80 mx1.u4gf.com - - [17/Oct/2012 07:38:53] "GET http://ad.yieldmanager.com/imp?Z=160x600&s=2959021&T=3&_salt=1516586745&B=12&m=2&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunshinefelling.com%2Findex.php%3Fview%3Darticle%26catid%3D45%253Aplus-size-dresses%26id%3D7512%253A2012-01-25-22-42-00%26format%3Dpdf%26option%3Dcom_content%26Itemid%3D101&r=1 HTTP/1.0" - -

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• Importing a large dataset into a database

  - by peaceful

  I'm a beginning programmer in the relevant areas to this question, so if possible, it'd be helpful to avoid assuming I know a lot already. I'm trying to import the OpenLibrary dataset into a local Postgres database. After it's imported, I plan to use it as a starting seed for a Ruby on Rails application that will include information on books. The OpenLibrary datasets are available here, in a modified JSON format: http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/jsondump I only need very basic information for my application, much less than what is provided in the dumps. I'm only trying to get out book titles, author names, and relationships between books and authors. Below are two typical entries from their dataset, the first for an author, and the second for a book (they seem to have an entry for each edition of a book). The entries seem to lead off with a primary key, and then with a type, before including the actual JSON database dump. /a/OL2A /type/author {"name": "U. Venkatakrishna Rao", "personal_name": "U. Venkatakrishna Rao", "last_modified": {"type": "/type/datetime", "value": "2008-09-10 08:44:01.978456"}, "key": "/a/OL2A", "birth_date": "1904", "type": {"key": "/type/author"}, "id": 99, "revision": 3} /b/OL345M /type/edition {"publishers": ["Social Science Research Project, Dept. of Geography, University of Dacca"], "pagination": "ii, 54 p.", "title": "Land use in Fayadabad area", "lccn": ["sa 65000491"], "subject_place": ["East Pakistan", "Dacca region."], "number_of_pages": 54, "languages": [{"comment": "initial import", "code": "eng", "name": "English", "key": "/l/eng"}], "lc_classifications": ["S471.P162 E23"], "publish_date": "1963", "publish_country": "pk ", "key": "/b/OL345M", "authors": [{"birth_date": "1911", "name": "Nafis Ahmad", "key": "/a/OL302A", "personal_name": "Nafis Ahmad"}], "publish_places": ["Dacca, East Pakistan"], "by_statement": "[by] Nafis Ahmad and F. Karim Khan.", "oclc_numbers": ["4671066"], "contributions": ["Khan, Fazle Karim, joint author."], "subjects": ["Land use -- East Pakistan -- Dacca region."]} The size of the uncompressed dumps are enormous, about 2GB for the authors list, and 18GB for the book editions list. OpenLibrary does not provide any tools for this themselves, they provide a simple unoptimized Python script for reading in sample data (which unlike the actual dumps comes in pure JSON format), but they estimate if that was modified for use on their actual data it would take 2 months (!) to finish loading the data. How can I read this into the database? I assume I'll need to write a program to do this. What language and any guidance on how I should do it to finish in a reasonable amount of time? The only scripting language I have any experience with is Ruby.

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